Circling the drain: Daily Progress eliminates most home delivery options

Charlottesville’s legacy newspaper, the Daily Progress, is no longer offering daily delivery options on its web site.

At DailyProgress.com, potential new subscribers are provided only two choices:

• 26 weeks of digital subscription for $1.00 (renews at $10.99/mo)
• One month of Sunday-only delivery plus digital subscription for $21.67

The once flourishing publication appears to be in its death throes with:

• Only two dedicated local news reporters remaining
• Most editions having only a single local news story, at best
• A preponderance of regional (reprints from sister publications, i.e. Richmond Times Dispatch) and national (Associated Press) content
• Nearly identical articles often printed in the same edition of the paper in order to fill space
• An increasing number of typos and publishing errors (i.e. html code appearing in print)
• Woke, leftist journalistic style incorporation becoming the norm (i.e. Black vs. white; using “they” as a pronoun in referring to a single, named person, etc.)
• A strong leftist slant to everyday news “reporting”

In addition, the editorial bent of the Progress has gone from centrist to extremist under the tutelage of Editorial Page Editor, Jim “Lefty” Spencer, who brings a Washington Post (non-) sensibility to the paper’s rapidly diminishing local audience.

The absence of a daily print newspaper will be detrimental for Charlottesville—as it has been for communities across the nation—but it didn’t need to end this way.

Fair reporting, traditional grammar and language application, competent editing, and balanced editorializing could have saved Charlottesville’s Daily Progress. Sadly, the opposite paths were followed and thus, the paper’s physical demise seems almost certain.